This is the watchdog package for Fedora. It implements a userspace
daemon which periodically pings (usually hardware) to tell the
hardware that the machine is alive. If the hardware times out without
receiving a ping, it assumes userspace is dead and reboots the
machine.
There are several major classes of watchdog available:
- watchdog hardware implementing the Linux /dev/watchdog API
* drivers in /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/watchdog/
* http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/watchdog/watchdog-api.txt
- softdog
* software watchdog (just runs inside the kernel)
* implements the Linux /dev/watchdog API
* won't help you if the kernel fails (obvious, right?)
- IPMI
* a heavyweight standard for all things server-management
* separate Linux driver
* ipmitool to control it
* see README.watchdog.ipmi for how to use this daemon together
with IPMI
You can also use watchdogs inside recent QEMU/KVM virtual machines.
When running qemu, specify "-watchdog i6300esb" on the qemu command
line (or use libvirt). Inside the guest, the i6300esb watchdog driver
should automatically load and provide you with a Linux /dev/watchdog-
compatible API.
- Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com) 2009-02-26